No Place Like Home

by Leigh Michaels

  The cat put his head on her shoulder and purred. At least someone was happy these days, Kaye told herself.

  Her words had to have cut Brendan deeply, she thought. She had held Graham up to him as the example of manliness, when she knew, deep in her heart, that a man who put his business first would not make much of a husband. She wanted more than that from the man she loved.

  Was it any wonder he hadn’t even tried to talk to her? Her accusations had been designed to hurt, and she knew only too well how successful she must have been. Or, she thought, even worse – had what she said not mattered to him at all?

  “That’s beside the point. I’m going to have to apologize,” she told herself. “For my own peace of mind, I’ll have to tell him I’m sorry for a lot of what I said. Dammit, why couldn’t I fall neatly in love with Graham? He thinks the way I do!”

  No, he doesn’t, she reminded herself. Graham wanted a wife, a house, a family because those things were expected of a man in his position. She closed her eyes and tried to imagine Graham bathing a baby, or soothing a sick child, or listening to a teenager’s tale of injustice. He would have no patience to spare for problems like that; those irritations in life would all be delegated to his wife because the smooth running of his home would be strictly her concern.

  Kaye started to giggle. “Graham doesn’t need a wife,” she said, “he needs a vice-president!”

  Brendan, on the other hand, she thought, would be a different story. Her eyes grew soft at the thought of Brendan’s capable, beautiful hands dealing with an infant, just as surely as he had caressed her...

  “And that’s enough of that,” she reminded herself. Brendan McKenna might never stop moving long enough to find out what fatherhood was like. But that was really none of her business, Kaye told herself.

  She could argue with herself till doomsday, but she still had an apology to make. It took her another full day to work up her courage, and on Saturday she gathered up his books and took them back to the real estate agency.

  Cindy, the gorgeous brunette at the front desk, looked quizzically at Kaye, and then at the stack of books she carried.

  “These are Brendan’s,” Kaye said, in her best brisk and businesslike voice. “He loaned them to me, and I’m sure he’s been anxious to get them back.”

  “Oh, there’s no hurry.” The girl put her pencil between her teeth so she had both hands free to manage the heavy books. “I’ll put them in his office. Shall I have him call you?”

  “He isn’t in? I thought I saw his car.” Dummy, Kaye told herself. You worked up your courage and plotted your act all out, but you weren’t even smart enough to make sure he was here!

  “No. Didn’t he tell you?” the girl added indistinctly, around the pencil.

  “Tell me what?” Kaye asked. There was a flutter of foreboding deep inside her. What had Brendan done now?

  “He’s in Wisconsin fishing this week. He left Wednesday afternoon. But I was sure he’d told all his clients.”

  On Tuesday night, Kaye reflected, they’d been in Nassau. And Wednesday he’d gone fishing? He certainly hadn’t wasted any time in getting out of Henderson.

  I wonder if he thought I might get a wrong impression if he stayed around. He might have thought I’d come back and beg for some more of his attention.

  So much for the idea that her tirade might have hurt his feelings, she thought. And I believed that he might actually have taken it seriously! I came in to apologize for what I said, and they tell me he was so unconcerned about it that he’s already off on another spree! Dear, sweet, selfish Brendan—

  She was building up to an explosion, and the girl was watching her curiously.

  There was no point in making a scene, Kaye decided. Brendan would be certain to hear about that, and her dignity demanded that she not give him the satisfaction.

  She swallowed her anger and said, civilly, “I see. I’m no longer looking for a house, so I suppose that’s why he didn’t bother to let me know he was going out of town.”

  The girl set the books on the shelf behind her desk and took the pencil out of her mouth. “Have you and Mr. Forrest found what you were looking for?”

  “Not exactly.” Her broken engagement was not a secret, but Kaye could see no reason to confide in Cindy.

  “If we can do anything for you...”

  “Thank you. I’ll keep it in mind.” Kaye started towards the door, and then turned. “Tell me. I don’t mean to be nosy, but doesn’t it bother anyone around here when Brendan just takes off like this?”

  “Why should it?” the girl asked. “He sold almost five million dollars’ worth of property last year. If he stayed around all the time, no one else in this office would ever sell anything.”

  Kaye blinked. Five million dollars? He had certainly never said anything to her to indicate that sort of volume. But then, she realized, she had never asked, either.

  “Real estate is an odd field,” the girl went on. “You can work like fury and not sell a thing. It’s mostly a matter of trusting your instincts and learning to be in the right place, Brendan says. And being patient.”

  “Just like fishing,” Kaye said, with wry humor that stopped barely short of bitterness.

  “You might say that,” said the girl, thoughtfully. “Maybe I should learn to fish. It certainly seems to have worked for him.”

  Kaye managed to get out of the office without showing her shock. So Brendan wasn’t exactly small fry himself, was he?

  Not that it mattered, she told herself. He was still irresponsible, no matter how many lucky deals he had pulled off last year. A fishing trip to Wisconsin—in the middle of March, at that. She wondered what on earth he was fishing for. And she hoped he froze his toes off.

  Enough, she thought. I’ve made my effort to apologize, and I’m done.

  She wasn’t going to chase after a man who had made it quite plain that he didn’t want anything to do with her. It was time to pick herself up and go on living. She used to be quite happy without him, and she could be again.

  Well, not exactly happy, perhaps. But she could be content with her life again...

  No, I can’t, she realized suddenly. Not after he’d moved in and thoroughly shook it up. If only he wouldn’t do that sort of thing all the time, she thought helplessly. Life with him would be something like living on a roller- coaster.

  But at least I’d know I was alive, she thought humbly. With Brendan, life would be a heady brew, rich and strong...

  But she hadn’t been invited to share his life, she reminded herself. And even if there had been a hope of a life that included him, in any way at all, she had sacrificed it when she had flung those flesh-tearing words at him in the hotel lift in Nassau. She would simply have to live with the consequences.

  *****

  She took Nora Farrell to church on Sunday morning, and out to lunch afterwards – ignoring the warnings of her conscience, which said she was doing it for selfish reasons and not humanitarian ones. Why should Nora suffer because Brendan was out of town? she asked herself. If Nora wanted to talk about him, Kaye didn’t have to listen.

  But Nora didn’t mention him, and by the time they were finished with lunch, Kaye’s nerves were screaming. Why had Nora been so silent about him, when before he had been her favorite subject? Was she angry at Brendan herself? Or had he asked her not to talk about him to Kaye?

  Now you’re getting paranoid, Kaye told herself in disgust.

  On the way home, Nora asked diffidently, “Did Brendan understand when you told him about the key?”

  “Key?” Kaye asked absently. Then she caught herself. The key to Nora’s house still lay in the bottom of her handbag; it had made the trip to Nassau with her, and she had completely forgotten that she had intended to give it to Brendan.

  Nevertheless, she concluded, with her brain working furiously, she didn’t dare admit that she still had the key, or Nora would probably ask to be taken to the house right now.

  “Of course he unde
rstood,” she said. And now, she reminded herself, you’re a liar. So she’d have to track Brendan down now, just to make sure he didn’t give her away next time he talked to Nora... Oh, how complicated a life of intrigue could get to be!

  “He didn’t say anything about it,” Nora said stubbornly.

  “I mean, I’m sure that he will understand. I didn’t give it to him myself, actually. I left it at his office. But he’d already gone to Wisconsin.” And you, my girl, she told herself, are getting in deeper and deeper.

  She dropped Nora off with a thankful sigh and turned towards the supermarket, because there were a few things she needed before she went home. Some home, she thought rebelliously. Four walls and a cat, and no future at all.

  Your future is what you make it, Kaye, she reminded herself. She could keep on as she had been doing, or she could make some changes. For one thing, she could move. She could afford a larger apartment, in a little nicer neighborhood; it was just that before, she hadn’t wanted to put out the extra money. But if she was going to spend her life alone, she owed it to herself to have a place she liked. The balance in the savings passbook wasn’t the only measure of success.

  She was a little surprised at the thought. Some of Brendan’s philosophy must have rubbed off, she thought. For the first time, she realized that being around him had already changed her. She had never in her life done anything so casually, or on such short notice, as she had since Brendan came into her life. A year ago, she would never have taken the Bahamas jaunt, even if the ticket had been dropped into her hand – because it would have been too sudden, and there would have been too many things that had to be done instead.

  Well, she thought, with a bit of humility, perhaps I’ve gained something from the experience after all.

  She found herself in front of Nora’s old house, without quite knowing how she had gotten there. I wish I could walk through it again, she thought, in daylight, so I could really see it.

  At night, all the glass had looked dull and blank, reflecting only the interior emptiness. Today, even though the sun was weak, the outside light pouring through the beveled and leaded windows would make it look like a different house.

  Tell the truth, Kaye, she ordered. You aren’t particularly interested in the glass. You want to stand there in the front hall and remember the first time he kissed you!

  She had a key ... but if she used it, she’d be trespassing. She had no possible excuse for being in there.

  But who is going to make a fuss? the other half of her mind questioned. The For Sale sign was still on the lawn. The lockbox was still on the front door. No one would ever know she’d been inside.

  Take a risk, Kaye. Live a little.

  She stood on the sidewalk with her hands in the pockets of her light jacket. Winter had slipped away in the last few days, and spring had tiptoed in. Their stolen day of summer was already no more than a dream, distant and faded. The only reminder that she had gone with him, had made love with him, was inside her, in this tremulous new desire to stop life from passing her by, to give up the safe path sometimes and strike out across the unmarked wild.

  She looked up at the house for a long moment, and then she reached into her handbag for the key.

  She wouldn’t have been surprised if it hadn’t worked at all; it would have been only sensible for the bank to have changed the locks. But the tumblers clicked open almost noiselessly, and the door swung silently open under her hand, almost as if the hinges had been oiled. She stepped across the threshold with her heart in her throat.

  She had been right about daylight making a difference. High on the stair landing, the rose window gathered the light and then shattered it into rainbows that cascaded across the falling wallpaper and down the stairs, over the faded roses on the old hall carpet and right to her feet. The sheer loveliness of it caught at her, and she blinked tears away—tears, she told herself, that had nothing to do with the memories of the other time she had stood here, safely sheltered in Brendan’s arms.

  No wonder that Nora loved this house so, she thought. And what a shame that no one else seemed to see the potential here. Kaye did—but it was out of the question for her to do anything about it. A larger apartment was one thing, but that was a long way from taking on the financial burden of a sixteen-room house in desperate need of restoration.

  She tore herself away from the rose window and walked on into the big double parlor, with its golden oak mantel and the huge bay window, and for the first time she noticed the scratching noise that was coming from the back of the house. It had been there all along, she concluded, just at the edge of her consciousness. It must be a branch scraping against the outside wall, driven by the March wind. But it was awfully loud for a branch. Had another window been broken out?

  She reached the kitchen and saw the dark outline of a person silhouetted against the window, and only then did she realize that a prudent woman would have gotten out while she could. The house, warm and deserted as it was, might have attracted all kinds of intruders, from homeless tramps to neighborhood kids to criminals in hiding—

  Too late to run, she thought.

  “What are you doing here?” she challenged.

  The man turned, and for an instant she couldn’t breathe at all.

  “I have a key,” Brendan said quietly. “What’s your excuse?”

  “You’re in Wisconsin, fishing!” she said idiotically.

  “I had to come back sometime.” He didn’t sound as if it mattered much. “How did you get in?”

  “Nora kept a key. I talked her out of it, so I could give it to you.”

  He looked her over unemotionally—the same way, she thought, that he would inspect a cracked wall. “You obviously weren’t expecting to see me when you came in,” he said, finally. “So what are you doing here?”

  “I just came in to look around, all right? Must you be so hateful? If I’d known you were here, I wouldn’t have come within a mile of the place.”

  “No,” he said, “I don’t suppose you would. You left no doubt about your opinion of me.” He kicked at a piece of fallen plaster; the gritty substance sliding across the flagstone floor made the same scratching sound that had drawn her into the room. He was wearing jeans and a flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up, she noticed; he looked as if he’d just come in off a lake somewhere.

  “Look,” she said, with an effort to be cheerful. “I was really upset when I said those things, and I was scared to death we were going to miss that plane, and I took it all out on you. It was unfair of me, and...”

  “Would it have been so awful?” It was a husky whisper. “To have been left behind in Nassau?”

  It would have been the most beautiful thing in my life, she thought. And I wasn’t smart enough to see it, or to trust you.

  She was trying to gather her courage to tell him that, when he went on, “That’s an unfair question, isn’t it? Forget I asked it.”

  “I didn’t really mean all that stuff,” she said uncertainly. “About you being irresponsible and selfish, and a playboy, and just like my father...” Her voice trailed off as she saw the angry sparks in his eyes. Dammit, she thought, I’m trying to apologize. Why should that make him angry?

  “What happened, Kaye? Did you take a good look in your mirror, and decide that it wasn’t smart to throw rocks at others for taking part in the same pastimes you were indulging in?”

  “What does that mean?” She was aghast at the suppressed fury in his tone.

  “I thought you were misguided, and confused about what you wanted. I never dreamed you could be so cold-bloodedly open about what you were doing.” He sounded bitter. “You call me a playboy, but at least I wasn’t cheating on the person I plan to marry.”

  “Graham?” she whispered.

  “Do you have another fiancé in the wings?” he mocked. “So you’re going to marry him, Kaye. You’ll have your big house and your afternoon bridge clubs and your trips all over the world. I’m sure you’ll manage to give him
a blonde baby or two to photograph and put on the jar labels, just to keep your position secure. But what are you going to do when all that gets old, Kaye—when you’re bored with it all? Don’t call me when you want to indulge yourself in an afternoon fling. I’m not proud of my part in what happened.”

  “You’re not proud?” she whispered. “How do you think I feel?”

  “Have you made a full confession to Graham? Or are you afraid to tell him, for fear of losing your comfortable niche in life? I wonder just how much Graham will put up with from you.”

  Kaye’s temper was at white heat. It was no more than she had expected, to have him fling these hateful things at her. But it hurt, nevertheless. It felt as if his words were tiny razors, each one slicing another fragment from her heart. “Have you finished?” she demanded.