Tea and Destiny

by Sherryl Woods

“No way,” he said. “I need this.”

  She decided it was only possible to wean an adult from so many bad habits at a time. She released the can.

  “How about a nice bowl of oat bran?” she suggested cheerfully.

  “I’d rather eat wood chips.”

  The grumpy remark brought forth giggles from the kids, who’d been avidly watching the contest of wills.

  “Oatmeal, then?” she said, undaunted.

  His injured gaze pierced her. “Is this some sort of punishment?”

  “Take the oatmeal,” David warned. “It’s the best you’re likely to get when she’s on one of these health kicks. By the weekend she might loosen up enough to make pancakes.”

  “Not for you, you little traitor,” she said, turning on David with mock ferocity and giving up the battle of wills with Hank. Let him figure out what to eat now that his doughnuts were in the garbage. “Where’s Jason? Is he up?”

  “I’m here,” he said, skirting Hank’s vicinity and dragging out the chair farthest from his nemesis. Ann could practically feel the animosity radiating from the teenager. She wondered if Hank could possibly bridge it or, for that matter, if he was even still planning to try.

  “Morning, Jason,” Hank said, practically willing the boy to look at him. Holding her breath, Ann waited.

  Jason finally mumbled a greeting, but kept his eyes on his bowl of cereal. While the other kids chattered and began racing around to collect their books for school, Jason remained sullen and silent. The minute he’d finished, he scooted back from the table.

  “Wait,” Hank said.

  “Gotta go.”

  “You have a few minutes. If you’re late, I’ll take you to school.”

  Jason shot a look at Ann that was clearly an appeal. “Sit down,” she said gently. “Listen to what Hank has to say.”

  Grudgingly Jason sat back down, but his entire body was stiff. He clearly resented Hank and it was going to take an incredible effort to get through the barriers he’d erected.

  “I got to thinking about something last night,” Hank began. “A guy your age could probably use some extra cash, right?”

  Ann saw the spark of interest that flared in Jason’s eyes before he could hide it. Still, he gave a disinterested shrug.

  “So I was wondering how you’d like to come to work for me after school and on Saturdays.”

  Jason’s brief hint of interest vanished and with it Ann’s hopes. Jason faced Hank with open hostility. “Work for you? No way I’m taking orders from you, man.”

  “Jason, that’s no way to talk to Hank,” Ann said. “Listen to him.”

  “Why should I? He’s just trying to buy me off.”

  Hank, to his credit, ignored the bitter accusation. As if Jason had never spoken, he said, “You’ll get a decent salary and you’ll earn every penny of it. You’ll be learning something new. Who knows, maybe you’ll even like it enough that it’ll help you decide on a career. That’s something you should be starting to think about.”

  Jason ignored Hank and looked directly at Ann. “Do I have to?”

  She glanced at Hank, who shook his head slightly. She sighed. “You don’t have to, but I’d like you to think about it. A lot of kids your age would give anything for an opportunity like this. It’s a chance to get some experience before you have to make a decision about college.”

  “Yeah,” he said derisively. “I’m gonna go to Harvard on my looks, right?”

  “Jason!” Hank warned.

  Ann intervened. “You have good grades, Jason. Maybe we won’t be able to afford an Ivy League school, but you can get a college degree if you want one badly enough. Working for Hank would be one way to begin getting some of the money you’d need. Think about this.”

  “That’s all I’m really asking, son,” Hank said. “Think about it. Talk it over with your buddies at school and see what they think. I’ll bet a lot of them already have after-school jobs. You can give me your answer tonight.”

  His expression still sour, Jason gave a curt nod. “Okay. Now can I go?”

  “Go,” Ann said, exhausted by the exchange.

  When he’d gone, she looked at Hank. “I see what you mean. His hostility’s getting worse, instead of better. Maybe I’ve been blinding myself to it.”

  “You’ve just been loving him. And I’ve probably made it worse. Don’t work yourself into a state over this. I can handle Jason,” he said, drinking the last of his soda and getting to his feet.

  “But you shouldn’t have to. He’s my responsibility.”

  Hank squeezed her shoulder reassuringly. “Uh-uh. He’s old enough to take responsibility for himself. Have a good day, Annie.”

  After Hank had gone, with the warmth of his touch fading, but the memory of Jason’s animosity still lingering, Ann wondered if a good day was even remotely possible. What if he was right about Jason? What if he was heading for trouble again? Was there anything she or even the two of them together could do to stop it?

  That afternoon when the high school let out, Hank was waiting for Jason. He spotted him coming down the walk, books under his arm and a smile on his face. The slender, dark-haired girl beside him was laughing at something he’d said. When he spotted Hank, his expression sobered at once.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I thought maybe we could finish our talk.”

  “I got nothing to say to you.”

  Hank permitted himself a slight grin. “Maybe not, but there are a few things I’d like to say to you.”

  “Save it for later. I’m busy.”

  “I’m sure your friend will forgive you,” Hank said pointedly.

  “It’s okay, Jason,” the girl said, smiling at Hank. “I gotta get home anyway.”

  Jason seemed about to argue, then his shoulders slumped. “I’ll call you later.”

  “Great.”

  As soon as she’d gone, he whirled on Hank. “What’d you have to go and do that for? I don’t need my friends thinking I’ve got some hard-ass truant officer breathing down my neck.”

  “I seriously doubt that’s what she thought and even if it was, I’m sure you can set her straight. In the meantime, I want to talk to you about Ann.”

  To his surprise, Jason hesitated. “Is she okay? There’s nothing wrong with her, is there?” There was genuine concern in the boy’s voice. It gave Hank the first hope he’d felt in days.

  “She’s worried about you.”

  “That’s only because you’ve gotten her all stirred up. We was getting along just fine until you came.”

  “You were getting along just fine.”

  “That’s what I said.”

  Hank rolled his eyes. “Get in the truck. We can talk on the way.”

  “On the way where?”

  “To your new job.”

  “I told you, man. I ain’t working for you.”

  “Aren’t, Jason. Do you ever crack that grammar book you’ve got under your arm?”

  “I know enough to pass.”

  “And that’s good enough for you? Just passing.”

  “It beats what my old man did. He dropped out when he was fifteen.”

  “And look how he wound up,” Hank pointed out.

  Jason looked as though he wanted to take a punch at him. Hank held up his hand. “Sorry. That was out of line. What I’m trying to say here is that you’re too smart to waste your potential the way you’ve been doing. Ann went out on a limb for you. Don’t you think you owe it to her to try a little harder?”

  “She’s never complained.”

  “Because she loves you. Maybe a little too much. She doesn’t want to put extra pressure on you, but I think you’re tough enough to take it. What do you think?”

  “I’m tough enough to take anything you can dish out.”

  “Prove it. Start that job this afternoon. You won’t be answering to me, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  Jason clearly saw the trap that had been laid out for him. He also ap
parently realized there was no way around being snared, unless he wanted to show himself as a quitter. “I’ll try it,” he finally conceded. “But if I don’t like it, I’m out of there.”

  “Fair enough.”

  Hank introduced him to the site foreman, then watched as Ted put him to work. By six o’clock Jason was dirty, hot and exhausted, but some of his belligerence had dimmed. Hank offered him a lift home.

  “What the hell,” Jason muttered, climbing into the pickup. “We’re going to the same place.”

  At home, Jason walked through the kitchen like a kid asleep on his feet. Ann started to stop him, but Hank waved her off. “Let him go. He’ll feel better after he’s had a shower and some dinner.”

  “He took the job?”

  “With a little prodding.”

  “Hank, you didn’t back him into a corner, did you?”

  “Maybe.”

  “But…”

  “There’s a door. He can always get out, if he wants to badly enough.”

  She nodded as Hank went off to take his own shower.

  When he’d cleaned up and changed, he came back and found Ann sitting on the floor in the living room with Tommy and Melissa. Tommy, wearing his yellow hard hat, appeared to be in charge. They were building a skyscraper out of colored blocks. It was already tilting precariously.

  Hank watched them for several minutes, enjoying the expression of fierce concentration on Melissa’s face, the tolerant amusement on Ann’s. “You’d better put something under the southwest corner,” he advised Tommy finally.

  “This is our development,” Ann retorted. “You’ve got your own.”

  “Mine’s bigger.”

  She shot a baleful look at him. “Bigger isn’t necessarily better.”

  “Maybe not, but mine will still be standing in twenty years. Yours may not make it another twenty seconds.” As if to prove his point, it wobbled under the weight of a red block Tommy was trying to add to the top. He knelt down and quickly inserted a block in the foundation. “There you go, partner. Steady as the Empire State Building.”

  “Is that tall?” Tommy wanted to know.

  “Very tall.”

  “Want to see it,” Melissa said.

  “Maybe someday we can,” he told her, his gaze locking with Ann’s just as she tried to tell Melissa that it was too far away.

  “Want to go,” Melissa repeated.

  “Someday,” Hank repeated firmly, his eyes never leaving Ann’s face, which was coloring under the direct gaze.

  “What’s for dinner?” he said at last, breaking the tension.

  “Oh, my gosh,” she said, jumping up and knocking over the tower in the process.

  Melissa wailed. Tommy began gathering all the blocks and methodically going back to work. Hank dropped down to the floor. “I’ll help, while Mommy gets dinner on the table.”

  “If I wasn’t so terrified of what you’d fix, I’d send you to the kitchen,” Ann said. “Nobody but an inveterate chauvinist would assume that cooking is woman’s work, while building skyscrapers can only be done by big, tough men.”

  “Hey, I didn’t say anything of the kind,” he protested, laughing at her indignation. “I suspect that Melissa here could make a mighty fine engineer one day. I may even train her to follow in my footsteps.”

  Again he saw that off-guard look of wistfulness on Ann’s face. His references to events far in the future seemed to rattle her even more than his touches. Perhaps she was right to be wary. How serious was he? The remarks seemed to come out without conscious thought on his part, indicating some subconscious direction in which he was heading without realizing it.

  He blamed it on weeks of abstinence. Maybe he just needed to recall the experience of having a possessive woman back in his life again. A few carefully veiled references to commitment would put the fear of God back into him. Meantime, he was going to have to learn to think before he spoke.

  Oddly enough, though, he couldn’t keep his mind off the future all evening long. As he watched Ann, a yearning began to build inside him. He wondered what it would be like to know that this was the way it would be for the rest of his life, to know that she would always be there waiting for him, that he would be enveloped in that loving generosity of spirit that made her care for all these children as if they were her own.

  He also wondered again why she was every bit as wary of the future as he was. What had scarred her so deeply? She’d learned many of his secrets, but what about hers?

  While she put the kids to bed, he stretched out in the hammock, staring up at the inky sky. The scattering of stars seemed so much brighter here, away from the city lights. What did they hold for the future?

  He heard the creak of the back door.

  “Annie?”

  “Yes.”

  “Come join me.”

  She took several steps in the direction of his voice, then hesitated as if she’d just realized where he was.

  “Come on. There’s room enough here for two.”

  “I don’t think so. I really should go in and do the dishes.”

  “They’ll wait. This sky won’t. It may never be exactly this way again. One of those stars may fall.”

  “Why, Hank Riley, I do believe you may have the soul of a poet after all.”

  “I’ve always said you didn’t give me enough credit for having a soul at all. Come on, Annie. How can you be afraid of a poet?”

  He heard her low chuckle as she came closer. “They’re the worst kind of romantic,” she retorted.

  He reached out, grabbed her wrist and pulled her into the hammock. She fell half-across him, torturing him with the press of her breasts against his chest, the whisper of her breath across his cheek. She struggled for just an instant, then seemed to sigh.

  “Stay, Annie,” he pleaded. “Right here beside me.”

  After a long hesitation during which he remained absolutely still, she lifted herself up from his chest and resettled herself beside him in the wide hammock. Her head rested on his shoulder.

  “Watch for a shooting star,” he said softly. “Then make a wish.”

  “Don’t tell me you believe in all that?” she scoffed, her voice amused.

  “You never know. I’m a firm believer in hedging all my bets.”

  “Are you a gambling man, Hank?”

  It was an idle, teasing question, but he took it seriously. He thought about it for several minutes before saying honestly, “I never thought I was until recently.”

  “What’s your game? Poker? Blackjack? Horses?”

  “Love.”

  Ann’s breath caught in her throat. “That’s not a game.”

  “I’ve always played it as though it was. What about you? Have you ever been in love?”

  “Once. A long time ago.”

  “What happened?”

  She was quiet for so long he was afraid she might not answer, but it was a night made for sharing secrets. It was still enough and dark enough to hold a promise of endless privacy no matter what was revealed. “He left me.”

  There was a lifetime of raw pain behind those three simple words. “Why would any sane man ever leave a lovely woman like you?”

  “Because,” she said, her voice emotionless, “he was twenty-two and he was too young to want to be saddled with a wife and a baby.”

  Though there wasn’t a sound besides the whisper of her voice and the occasional shriek of a gull, Hank knew she was crying. He could feel the dampness rolling from her cheeks onto his shirt, soaking it. The thought of her hurting for so many years made him ache inside. He wanted to enfold her in his embrace, to protect her from ever knowing such pain again, but he sensed that what she needed was to talk. He encouraged it by his silence.

  “We were engaged,” she began in a voice that was now roughened by tears. “But when I went to tell him about the baby, he got furious. He wanted to go to medical school. He had all these plans, you see. He blamed me for trying to ruin them. I tried to make him see that it would
be okay, that we could manage, but he walked out. I never saw him again. The next day I lost the baby.”

  She laughed bitterly. “Ironic, isn’t it? If he’d stuck around, we wouldn’t have had anything to worry about.”

  “You would have been miserable with a selfish jerk like that.”

  “Maybe so, but at the time I thought my world had ended.”

  “And you’ve spent the rest of your life making sure that no other man could get close enough to inflict that sort of pain.”

  He felt her head shake.

  “Yes, you have,” he insisted. “Or you’d have found someone else by now. Instead, you’ve filled your life with all the children no one else wanted to make up for the one this man didn’t want.”

  “Now who’s playing psychologist?”

  “Am I any good at it?”

  “Not bad, actually.”

  “Ann…” he began, but she pressed a finger against his lips.

  “Just because you know about my past doesn’t change anything, though. Not between us.”

  “Are you so sure of that?” he said, kissing her gently. The taste of her tears was on her lips. He wanted to go on kissing her until the memory blurred and finally faded altogether. Instead, he held back and watched her.

  “Are you sure?” he repeated.

  Blue eyes, fringed by long, sooty lashes, gazed back at him expectantly and he lost track of what he’d meant to say to persuade her to let go of the past. Provocative images replaced all thoughts of idle conversation. He swallowed hard past the lump in his throat as he finally tore his gaze away.

  “Maybe you ought to go get some sleep,” he said finally.

  She stared at him, then nodded. “Maybe so,” she said softly.

  For just an instant, Hank could have sworn he heard regret in her tone, but then she was on her feet and striding toward the house with that long-limbed gait that stirred him so.

  It was nearly an hour later when he finally dared to follow her inside. He’d hoped she’d gone to bed, but he found her at the sink, rinsing off dinner dishes with those familiar, sure movements. She’d changed clothes. A man’s wool plaid shirt hung nearly to her knees. Her legs were bare down to the bright yellow socks that had settled in folds at her ankles.

  Looking at those legs was dangerous, he decided at once. Taking a beer from the refrigerator, his eyes locked instead on the movement of her hands, soft and slippery against the fragile porcelain. He imagined them sliding over his flesh with the same gentle touch, the same deft strokes, water cascading around them, cooling their burning flesh. His blood surged at the image. He could hear the pounding of his heart, feel the throbbing low in his abdomen. His grip on the bottle of beer was so tight, he was afraid the glass would snap. If she didn’t get out of the kitchen in the next five minutes, he was going to forget all of his honorable intentions and take her right there.