“I don’t have any problems.”
“Oh, yeah? What was that sigh all about?” She squinted at Kate. “You’re mooning over that Dodd guy.”
“I’m not!”
“Then you’re stupid. Anyone with an ounce of sense would moon over him.”
“Well, maybe I’m mooning a little.”
Elsie took her meal out of the microwave and sat at the table. She ate a forkful of macaroni and cheese and sliced a piece of ham.
“I don’t usually make offers like this, but I can see you need some perking up.” She chewed her ham and prodded her green beans trying to decide if they were edible. “Besides, I need a ride,” she added. “So how about if I let you go to a bingo game with me tonight.”
“Uh—”
“This is your night off, isn’t it?”
“Well, yeah—”
“Okay, then it’s settled.” She finished her dinner and pushed the tray aside. “We better get a move on. I like to get there early so I get a good seat.”
Bingo? The Formidable Finn playing bingo? For an entire evening? She rushed after Elsie. “Listen, I’d really like to do this, but I have to—”
Elsie stopped with her coat halfway around her shoulders. “You have to what?”
Kate couldn’t think of anything she had to do. She looked at Elsie blank-faced and opened her mouth, but no words came out.
“What? What do you have to do?” Elsie asked.
“I… have to buy a coat. I don’t have a coat to wear.”
“So wear your sweatshirt. This isn’t no fancy dress ball we’re going to. This is a bingo game, for crying out loud.”
Kate meekly pulled the sweatshirt over her head. “I don’t know if this is such a good idea. I’ve never been to a bingo game. I wouldn’t want to slow you down.”
“Don’t worry about it. I’ll get you all fixed up.”
They ran into Dave on the sidewalk in front of Kate’s house.
Kate looked from Elsie to Dave. “Is this a setup?”
Dave widened his eyes in exaggerated curiosity. “Going someplace?”
“We’re going to a bingo game,” Elsie told him. “You can come if you want.”
Kate rammed her fists into her hips. “I’m not going if he’s going.”
“Her nose is outta joint,” Elsie told Dave. “What’d you do to her last night?”
“Nothing.”
“Well, no wonder,” Elsie said. “When I was her age I got grouchy when somebody did nothing to me, too.” She looked at Kate’s little compact with the bashed-in rear bumper and dented side fender, and she looked at Dave’s Porsche. “I never arrived at a bingo game in a Porsche before.”
“Then we’ll take my car,” Dave said. “I know how you feel about missed opportunities.”
“I thrive on missed opportunities,” Kate told them. “In fact, I’m going to miss this one.”
Dave wrapped an arm around her and pushed her forward. “You’re going to pass up a bingo game? Hard to believe. You’d better think it over.”
“I’ve thought it over!”
Dave opened the car door and pushed Kate in. “Think about it some more.”
Elsie slid in next to Kate and shoved her toward the driver’s side. “This car’s really something, isn’t it? Real leather. Smooth,” she said, running her hand over the dash.
Kate moved onto the console, straddling the gearshift. “Someone needs to sit in the little back seat. We don’t all fit up front.”
“Sure we do,” Dave said. “It’s nice and cozy.” He strapped on his seat belt, turned the ignition, and shifted into first, his hand snaking up the inside of Kate’s left thigh. “Good thing we’re such good friends,” he whispered. “I’d hate to have to shift up a stranger’s leg.” He accelerated slightly and glanced at her from the corner of his eye. “Are you ready for me to shift again?”
Kate gasped and flattened against the back of her seat when she realized where second gear was going to land him. “Don’t you dare…” Too late.
When he moved to third she had to grit her teeth to resist the temptation to grab his hand and put it back where it had been. “Is this bingo place far from here?” she managed to ask.
“Nope,” Elsie said. “It’s right around the corner.”
Kate didn’t know if she was relieved or disappointed.
Dave smiled in the dark. “Isn’t this fun? Aren’t you glad you decided to come?” he asked Kate.
She leveled a look at him. “I think that conclusion is premature.”
“Only because this ride was too short.” He parked and pulled her out on the driver’s side. “If you’re especially nice to me tonight, I’ll drive all the way home in second.”
“You’d better be nice to me, or I’ll put Elsie in the middle going home.”
Fifteen minutes later Kate found herself seated at a table with twelve bingo cards spread in front of her. “I can’t do this,” she said to Dave. “How am I supposed to keep track of twelve cards?”
He looked dumbfounded at his own array of cards. “Elsie says this is the way you do it.”
The man on the stage of St. Matthew’s auditorium called out, “B two.”
Kate’s gaze frantically moved over all her Bs. A thrill of excitement ran up her spine when she located a B2. “I’ve got one.”
“Shhh,” Dave said, “you’re ruining my concentration.”
“G nine. G number nine.”
“I’ve got one of those, too!” Kate shouted.
Dave turned and looked at her. Her eyes were bright and her cheeks flushed. The tip of her tongue was caught between her teeth as she waited for the next call. She had a dot-a-lot bingo marker ready in her hand. Bingo fever, Dave thought. She was practically rabid with it.
He put a few dots on his card to make it look as if he were playing, and he sat back and watched Kate. She’d completely tuned him out again, but he was beginning to get used to it. She was simply a totally focused person throwing every ounce of energy into the task at hand. He thought of the one night they’d shared and decided it was definitely a desirable character trait.
Her hand flashed across the table with another button. “I got another one,” she murmured.
Elsie was behind her. “This here’s crisscross bingo. You need that zero up in the corner to win. Or you could win with the ‘N’ space on the middle card.”
The man on the stage called out, “N 14,” and a woman across the room shouted, “Bingo.”
Kate’s mouth dropped open. “How could she get bingo so fast? She must have cheated.”
“That’s Tootsie Anheiser. She plays with more cards than you. She’s a bingo junkie. Drives a school bus all day just to support her bingo habit.”
“How awful,” Kate said, clearing her cards.
“Yeah. It’s sad.” Elsie looked over her shoulder as a new game was begun. “Okay, now we’re playing whole-card bingo. You gotta fill up a whole card to win this one.”
Kate rubbed her hands together. “I’m ready.”
Elsie caught Dave’s eye. “I’d hate to see her at a racetrack. She’d be running along the rail ahead of the horses.”
At eleven o’clock everyone filed out of the auditorium into the cold night air. Kate took a deep breath and looped her arm through Dave’s. “All right, now what do we do? I won twelve dollars! Let’s blow the whole wad on pizza.”
“Past my bedtime,” Elsie said. “I gotta get my beauty rest, or I won’t be able to make any of them grease burgers tomorrow.”
Dave grinned down at Kate. “We can drop Elsie off and do whatever you want.”
Kate unconsciously hugged against him. “I want a pizza. Double cheese, pepperoni, onions, green pepper, sausage, and mushrooms. And I want to drive,” she said, giving Dave’s arm a squeeze. “I’ve never driven a flashy car like this.”
If she’d asked him for the moon, he’d have tried to get it for her. Tomorrow he’d buy her a Porsche. Hell, he’d buy her three to make su
re she got the color she wanted. And if she smiled at him like that one more time, he’d go sailing over Washington like a helium balloon. There was real hope for them. Any woman who could get so excited over winning a bingo game could understand the value of Etch A Sketch… another of his favorite toys. He handed her the keys and walked around to the passenger side, thinking they might name their firstborn B16.
Elsie was waiting for him. “Go ahead and get in,” she said.
He bowed in courtly fashion. “After you.”
“The hell with ‘after you.’ I’m not sitting with that gearshift stuck between my legs. I’m an old lady. I’ve got some dignity.”
Kate was already behind the wheel. She hit the button to go top down and blew the horn. “Come on, you two, stop arguing and get in.”
He was a man who read comic books, and he knew when the Acme safe was about to score a direct hit on Wile E. Coyote. He heard it now, whistling in the air above his head. He’d been had.
Elsie and Kate could have crammed themselves in the little back seat but he sure as heck couldn’t.
He climbed onto the console and tried to stay calm while the engine purred to life. Nothing to worry about, he told himself. It was a short ride. How bad could it get?
He felt sweat break out at the small of his back as he watched Kate’s hand curl around the gearshift knob. He sucked in his breath when she skimmed the inside of his thigh with her knuckles en route to first, and he bit back a grunt when she brought the car up to 20 mph and slammed into second with the swift expertise of a NASCAR driver. He stole a quick glance down and wondered how well Elsie could see in the dark. Kate shifted to third, and before she could downshift for the corner, Dave replaced her hands with his. “You drive. I shift.”
“Party pooper.”
“When we’re alone you can party all you want.”
She parked the car in front of her house and waited while Elsie got out. “Would you mind if I gave you a rain check on the pizza? I’m starting to fade.”
Dave shifted in his seat so he could see her better. “Cold feet?”
“You bet.”
“We don’t have to party any more than you want.”
“Thanks.” She touched his hand. “I had fun tonight.”
“Fun is important. You need to have more fun.”
“I have fun all the time. I have fun performing.”
He relaxed against the car door. “There’s all kinds of fun. Some fun is more fun than other kinds.”
She laughed. “That’s so profound.”
“Maybe what we should do is make you a Potato. Can you throw a football?”
“No. And I don’t want to throw a football. I think the game is dumb.”
Dave sprang off the door. “Dumb? How can you say that? Football is practically the national sport. Football is essential to a well-balanced society. Kate, this is Redskin country.”
She wrinkled her nose.
“That does it. I can see I’ve got to take charge here. You don’t like football because you don’t know anything about it. Tomorrow I’m going to take you out and teach you how to pass the old pigskin.”
“No, no way, never, not me, unh-unh. I’m not the athletic type. I’ll break something.”
“You mean like a window?”
“Like a bone.”
Dave held her hand. “That’s ridiculous. We’ll just toss it back and forth. Let you get the feel of it.”
“I don’t have time.”
“We’ll do it during a break in your practice schedule. We can play in the middle of the street here. It’ll be good for you. A little exercise. A little fresh air.”
It sounded harmless enough, she thought. It might be nice to get out of the house for a few minutes and play catch with Dave.
“Okay. Tomorrow afternoon, around one o’clock. But don’t expect much.”
Chapter 7
The electricity was back. The roof was fixed. The second floor’s ceiling was whole again, and Elsie had been moved up to the third. Everything was back to normal. Nice and quiet. So quiet you could hear a pin drop. It should have been a wonderful day to practice, Kate thought, but she couldn’t get into it.
Impossible as it seemed, she missed the noise and the activity. She missed Mark and Shania. And she felt deprived, sitting in her kitchen with her face to a wall. Not to mention the ultimate distraction. David Dodd. He practically haunted her. Sleep was impossible; her instant coffee was tasteless and unsatisfying; she couldn’t get within three feet of a gearshift without getting a rush, and the clock was inexorably ticking its way to her football lesson.
She sighed and leaned on her cello. She should never have agreed to the football lesson. She was going to make a fool of herself. Worse than that, it was time spent with the Enemy. David Dodd inspired sloth and indulgence. He was a bad influence. And he was so darn tempting!
She gave a snort of disgust, grabbed her cello by the neck, and dragged her chair into the living room so she could sit beside the window. She was doing this because of the sun, she told herself. The light was better for reading music. It was not because she could see the street from her perch. After all, she had self-discipline.
While she was rearranging the music, a small bird in the dogwood tree distracted her. The bird was nutshell brown with a perky black cap and black bib. It twitched its tail and chirped and cocked its head at Kate, looking right at her with its bright black eye. Kate stood immobile, not wanting to frighten the bird away, and suddenly she had an exciting idea. She could hang a bird feeder on her dogwood, then she’d be able to sit at the window and watch the birds…
She hit her forehead with her fist. What a dunce! She was supposed to be practicing. A bird feeder was exactly what she didn’t need. “Watch the birds!” She groaned out loud and slouched in her chair. She was going down the drain, no doubt about it. And it was all Dave’s fault. She hadn’t been distracted by birds before he moved next door.
When she heard his front door slam, she knew it was the moment she’d been waiting for all day. Okay, so she admitted it. He was a bum, but she was dying to see him. That morning she’d shaved her legs, put on her best undies, and splashed perfume on her pulse points… just in case. Not that she was counting on anything. In fact, she was determined not to have anything happen. But just in case…
Her heart skipped a beat and picked up speed when she saw him standing on her sidewalk. “I hate this,” she said in the privacy of her house. “I really hate this.” She was infatuated with David Dodd, and she was being sucked into a romance she absolutely didn’t want. Despite all her good intentions, she had no control over the rhythm of her heart. It made her furious.
Dave didn’t have to read lips to know her mood. Though his smile was hopeful, he gave her a wide berth when she stomped down the porch stairs. “So, how’d your morning go?”
“Unh!”
“That bad, huh?”
“I did nothing all morning. You know why? Because of you. You and Mark and Shania and Elsie and that dumb bird who just flew away.”
“Mark and Shania?”
“Mark Beaman and Shania Twain. They’re not here anymore, and I keep listening for them.”
What a relief. For a minute there he thought he was going to have to duke it out with Mark and Shania. “I could help you out. I have some CDs—”
“I don’t want CDs. I don’t want Shania. I want to go back to being the person I used to be. I was happy. I was comfortable.” She snatched the football from Dave. “You know, footballs are ugly. You ever take a good look at this thing? It’s brown and bumpy. Why don’t they make them in prettier colors? And it’s shaped funny. It doesn’t fit in my hand.”
“Maybe we should do this some other day.”
She glared at him. “You trying to weasel out of this?”
“Nope. Not me.” He adjusted her hand around the football. “See, actually it fits okay if you hold it properly.” He stepped back a few paces. “Go ahead. Toss it to me.”
Dave retrieved the football and tried not to grin. Kate couldn’t help herself. Bingo fever was mutating. She was a perfectionist, a competitor, a performer. It didn’t matter if she was playing the cello, icing a cake, or flipping a football—she played to win. He threw the ball back to her and moved into the road. “This time don’t look at the ball. Look at me.”
She felt it slide off her fingertips and sail through the air in a graceful arc.
Dave caught it effortlessly. “That’s great. You’re a natural.”
She could throw a football! But she couldn’t catch it. He threw it back to her, and it bounced off her head. “You did that on purpose!”
“Pitch it to me and watch the way I catch it. And remember when you throw you look at me, but when you catch your eyes never leave the ball.”
“All right!” she said when she caught the next throw. “This isn’t bad. Watch me chuck it to you. Watch me roll out for the pass. Watch me… ooof!” She tripped over the curb and crashed into her garbage can.
Dave waited a minute to see if she’d get up. “Are you hurt?”
“Yes.”
He walked over to her. “Are you hurt bad?”
“Yes.”
He bent down. “Where?”
“Everywhere.”
“No place special?”
She propped herself up on her elbows. “My leg. My right leg.”
“Can you move your foot? Can you stand?”
She made an attempt and sucked in her breath. “No. Damn!”
“All right. No reason to panic. You stay there. Don’t move, and I’ll be right back.” He returned with scissors and cut her jeans off above the knee so they could see the leg.
“Well, at least there aren’t any bones sticking out,” she said, thankful she’d shaved her legs. “Now what?”
He took his keys from his pocket and unlocked his car. “Now we take you to the hospital to get an X-ray.”
Four hours later they arrived home in a limo.
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