by Dawn Atkins
Marcus was slicing the bread, so he’d heard.
“I’m simply asking you to keep your word, David.”
“No, you’re not. You hate Brigitte and you want to break us up. You can cut me off from everyone I care about, but you can’t change me. I’ll never be your perfect son with straight As and straight friends, on the student freaking council.”
“That’s not what I want and you know it.”
His eyes flashed with a hatred that scared her. “I don’t have to stay here, you know. I can leave.”
“That wouldn’t solve anything.” This was the first time he’d threatened to run away and it terrified her.
“If I found my father it would.”
“What?” Skip was the last thing David needed at the moment. Angry, flaky and mean, Skip would break David’s heart for sure.
“Just because you won’t look for him, doesn’t mean I can’t.” Skip’s bad credit history meant he never had a listed number, thank God, but still…
“That’s not what you want, David,” she said as kindly as she could manage.
“You don’t know what I want.” He brushed past her, pausing when he noticed Marcus holding the tray of bread, then barreled out the back door.
She wanted to go after him, but she knew better. David needed to cool off before they talked. Talked. Right. It had become a pointless exercise. He stonewalled every question. Christine fought despair.
“I can take over,” she said to Marcus, putting her hands beneath the tray, enjoying the comfort of his warm fingers for an instant. She liked that his face showed neither pity nor embarrassment over the outburst.
Together they served the dessert and when it was over started on the dishes, since cooking means cleanup was a commune rule. She tried to stay cheerful, but David’s anger was wearing her down. She’d begun to become discouraged.
“I’m sorry you heard that fight,” she said, glancing at Marcus. “Living with his father would be a disaster for David.”
“‘The grass always seems greener…’”
“More folk-saying therapy?” She couldn’t quite smile. “You probably think it’s bad that I won’t let him see his father, but if you knew Skip…”
“You don’t need to justify yourself to me, Christine.”
“He would break David’s heart.” She scrubbed fiercely at the plate she was cleaning, then plopped it into the rinsing sink so hard that water splashed Marcus’s face. “Sorry, sorry.” She brushed away the drops from his smooth cheek.
“I’m fine, Christine,” he said, low and reassuring, catching her hand in his.
The touch felt so good, she just stood there letting him hold her hand and look into her eyes, sending calm all the way through her.
She blew out a breath, then went back to the dishes, more gently this time. “Skip calls now and then, drunk or stoned, wanting to connect with David. I used to set up a day and time for him, but he always bailed. Thank God I never told David in advance. The man is an overgrown child, so distractible, with a scary temper—” She wiped a blob of lentils from a plate.
“Lately, I just let the machine take his calls.” A month before, he’d left her his most recent number and address.
She paused for Marcus to comment, but he kept rinsing and stacking, allowing her to fill the silence if she chose.
“Even if Skip did show up, he’d throw out pie-in-the-sky promises, then break them. David is too vulnerable now.”
She stopped washing and turned to him. “Don’t you think waiting until he’s eighteen is better? He’ll have more maturity to put the hurt in perspective and by then he’ll be done hating me.” She managed a half smile.
“Are you asking for my professional opinion again?”
“Would you give it to me? In an emergency?”
“I’m in no position to give advice,” he said. A shadow crossed his face and she realized her request disturbed him more than he had let on. “Want to hand me those?” he said, indicating the dishes she’d let pile up while she talked.
She wanted to ask him about that, but he was sending out leave-it-alone signals like mad, so she stuck to the dishes, glancing at him now and then. He had such a strong face—straight nose, solid jaw and a great mouth, sensual and masculine. His hair brushed his collar, as if he’d been too busy for a haircut and he smelled of a lime aftershave with a hint of sandalwood.
His presence calmed her, as well as the slow, sure movements of his strong hands. He was so quiet. “If I didn’t talk, would you ever break the silence?” she finally said.
“Excuse me?” He stopped rinsing and looked at her.
“You hardly ever talk,” she said.
“When I need to, I do.”
“So is it that after all those years of listening to people bitch and moan, you’ve had enough?”
His mouth twitched. She’d amused him. That felt like a prize.
“Meanwhile, I hate silence. I say whatever comes into my head. I’m probably annoying the hell out of you, huh?”
“No. I enjoy you. Kitchen duty is flying by.”
“That’s flattering. I’m more amusing than greasy plates.”
He laughed, looking almost boyish. “I didn’t mean it quite like that, no.”
“You have a great laugh,” she said. “You should do it more.”
He pondered that. “You think I’m too serious?”
“At times, I guess. But I like how you are, Marcus.” She touched his forearm and felt another, stronger frisson of desire. “You’re…soothing.”
“I soothe you?” He lifted an eyebrow, looking wry. “That’s not exactly flattering, either.”
“Well, you have other effects on me, too,” she said softly, moving closer. “The opposite of soothing.”
“I see.” Heat sparked in his eyes, but only for an instant. Then his eyes went sad, almost haunted, and she sucked in a breath. Something awful had happened to Marcus. She wondered if she’d ever find out what it was.
CHAPTER FOUR
MARCUS LEFT THE KITCHEN as soon as the dishes were done, saying he needed to work on his book, but he was clearly avoiding more sexual byplay or, perhaps, thoughts of the old hurt he’d remembered. Possibly his ex-wife?
What if he withdrew altogether? Christine would hate that. He provided the only spice and spark to her time at Harmony House. Dammit. For all its thrills, sex could be such a pain. If she lost Marcus’s friendship because of her stupid libido…
What did he think about her anyway? Men were a puzzle to her. Maybe because she’d never really known her father and had only Harmony House’s hippies and drifters as examples of manhood. There was Bogie, of course, who was sweet, but mostly a ghost in her life.
Her first sex with Dylan had confused and kind of scared her. After that came Skip, a smooth operator who’d promised much and given little, then one, two, three more screwups before she finally learned her lesson—hold back her heart, stick with short-term fun and friendship.
She didn’t blame her past or anything. She’d screwed up all on her own. But she wished to hell she was better with men.
Christine closed the last cupboard and sighed. Time to try to talk with David.
Outside the front door, the porch smelled of sun-scorched wood, reminding her of summer, returning wet and shivery from a swim in the river to dig into a slice of watermelon warm from the garden, spitting seeds at the other kids, letting the juice run down her chin, not caring about being neat at all.
The porch, with its rockers, wooden swing and cable spool tables had always been a popular hangout for talk, cards, music or watching people play Frisbee or dance in the yard.
“Nice night.” Aurora’s voice, from a rocking chair, startled her out of her reverie.
“Yes, it is.”
“Where you headed?” her mother asked, sipping iced tea, the ice cubes rattling gently in her glass.
“To check on David. We had an argument.”
“I’d leave him be if I were you.”
Christine bit back a sharp response. Aurora had hardly been Parent of the Year and now she was dishing out advice? Christine forced down her spike of outrage and sank into the fabric hammock for a moment. Now was as good a time as any to update Aurora on the clay works.
Organizing her thoughts, she ran her hands over the colorful braids that formed the hammock. “I recognize this cloth. Where’s it from?”
“It used to be my bedspread. Bogie made the hammock. He can make you one if you like. He does that for people.”
“Maybe we could sell them. Handcrafted at a commune? I bet the gift shops where we’re placing our ceramics would buy tons.”
Her mother chuckled. “You are a slave to profit. David’s right.” She was in a good mood at least.
“We all have our gifts.” Christine fingered the familiar cloth, lost in memory for a moment. She’d loved her mother’s bed, the smell of vanilla and patchouli, the orange light through the Indian-print curtains on the window.
“I liked your waterbed…the way it jiggled. You used to tell me stories sometimes.” When Aurora allowed it, Christine would cuddle up to her, toying with her mother’s thick braid while Aurora talked and talked.
“You and your endless questions,” Aurora said. “You were relentless.”
“They were mostly about my father,” she said, remembering vividly. “You would never tell me much about him.”
“It wasn’t relevant.” She locked gazes with Christine. “Do you tell David all about Skip?”
“Skip is a train wreck. My father was a good man.” A police officer who died in the line of duty when Christine was three.
“I told you he loved you. That should have been enough.”
“I wanted to know everything.” She remembered the gold buttons on his blue uniform, and the smell of leather and aftershave. “You didn’t even save a picture.”
Aurora shrugged. That was that. End of topic.
Christine felt a stab of the helpless feeling she used to get over Aurora’s stubborn silences—wanting so much to know about her father and having Aurora lock him away and toss the key. At least Christine had grown out of that pointless pain.
All she wanted now was to keep this fragile peace with her mother until it was time to leave. They were too different, her mother too shut down for them to ever be close, which had been her old stupid fantasy.
“You went ahead and bought that computer, didn’t you?” Aurora said gruffly.
“It was a good price, so, yes.”
“But you didn’t clear it with me. We agreed—”
“It was the one you chose, Aurora, with the features you liked, remember?” Her mother had pored over the catalog Christine had searched out on her laptop. “Tomorrow I want to show you the draft of the Web site. Also the PayPal account.”
“PayPal? This is the first I’ve heard of that,” she snapped, eyes sparking in the dim light of the porch.
“You wanted something easy to manage, remember? Lucy and I worked out the details. If you don’t like it we’ll change it.”
Her mother rocked angrily for a few seconds.
Christine took a slow breath and blew it out. Why did this bother her so much? She never got testy with clients when they second-guessed her. Only Aurora made her temper flare. “Also, I can get agency rates for some advertising at key venues that I know will generate more orders. If that’s all right, I’d like to set that up.”
“I told you before we’re not an assembly line.”
Calm, calm, calm. Lucy had asked her to push this issue with Aurora, so Christine would do her best. “Lucy and I worked out a plan. By enhancing the kiln, adding a second shift, plus some on-call part-timers, it’ll be easy. No worries for you or pressure. In your condition, you need low stress, so—”
“You let me worry about my condition.” Her mother glared at her. “You could stand to lower your stress, too. You act like if you hold still for one minute the world will stop turning.”
Christine closed her eyes to collect herself. She tried to rise above, but her mother’s digs and grumbles stung like sandpaper on a sunburn. “It’s your show, Aurora. If you don’t want ads, we won’t buy ads. But Lucy is getting frustrated. If you don’t watch it, you’ll lose her.”
Her mother stopped rocking and seemed to consider that. “Just be sure you stick around until every kink is worked out, like you said you would.” There was that underlying plea again: Please stay.
The request felt like a weight on Christine’s chest, making it hard to breathe. She couldn’t stay. No way. David hated it here, for one thing. He had school and she had plans to open her own agency. She had a life in Phoenix. Here was an awkward limbo.
She comforted herself with the thought that Aurora must be feeling weak still. As soon as she was herself again, she’d probably pack Christine’s bags herself.
“I’ll stay until you boot me out. How’s that?” she said, using the cheery voice of a nurse with a grumpy patient.
“See that you do,” Aurora said, as if she’d won a fight. “And do something with your room before you go. Paint it, replace that god-awful furniture with stuff from the spare room. That pink-and-gingham mess depresses the hell out of me.”
Great. Another mean zing to Christine’s heart. So much for Bogie’s claim that Aurora meditated about Christine in the room she’d kept the same all these years. The man lived in a sunny-side-up haze.
“Well, I like my old room,” Christine said just to be stubborn. “It’s darling. It makes me think of fairy tales.” She grinned.
“Good God,” her mother groused, looking off across the yard in the dark to where mesquite trees were silhouetted by moonlight. Was she smiling? Maybe.
Mission accomplished, more or less, so Christine rose from the hammock to go to David.
“You do need to cut David some slack,” Aurora said.
Anger spiked in Christine. Do not yell. Stay calm. “Excuse me, Aurora, but you have no idea what I’ve been through with him this last year.”
“I see what I see.”
Christine made herself count to ten—twice. “You promised to back me up with him.”
“I am backing you up. I told him to follow the rules.”
“And urged him to drive a car without a license.”
Aurora shrugged. “It’s summer vacation. He’s away from his friends. Give him a break.”
“A break? I had to beg the principal not to expel him. He’s got schoolwork he has to do if there’s any hope he can rescue enough credits to be a junior. Plus, we agreed to therapy. Real therapy, not crackpot tips from Doctor Mike, who got his doctorate from Wacko State University.”
“Doctor Mike is a great guy.”
“He’s a joke. Now I have to find someone in Preston.”
“Anything else I did wrong?”
“Since you asked, I don’t like David in such a faraway room. The last thing he needs is more freedom.”
“You weren’t much older when you left home, you know.”
“You think that was a good thing?” It was the loneliest she’d ever felt.
“It was what you wanted.” Her mother rocked back and forth.
She so much wanted to yell, but she kept her voice level. “I was a kid. I didn’t know what I wanted.” Aurora hadn’t even tried to stop her. Christine had hung back for a good hour before buying her bus ticket, secretly hoping Aurora would come to get her. But Aurora had let her go. Just like that.
“I will not leave my son to struggle on his own.”
“Like I did you?” Aurora said. Christine was startled to see hurt flicker in her mother’s brown eyes. “It was your life, Crystal. Holding you back would have made me a hypocrite after all I preached about choice and self-determination.”
“Sorry, but I was your daughter, not a political statement,” she said fiercely. Bitter hurt rose from deep within her. Maybe Aurora loved her, but it wasn’t any love Christine recognized—then or now.
Aurora didn
’t speak for a long moment and when she did, her tone was softer. “All I know is that my folks tried to lock me in and it made me desperate to escape. I did, but I had a weak moment when I found I was pregnant. The best thing they ever did was not let me back in. It made me stronger. That’s what leaving did for you. It made you independent.”
Not even close. Christine had been lost and scared and lonely until she’d latched on to Skip, a life raft in rough waters, she’d thought…until he dumped her into the deep again.
But that was old news. She’d learned and grown, so what was the point in rehashing it? What mattered now was David. “David’s growing up too fast. He needs to catch up with himself.”
“It’s the nature of kids to break away.”
“It’s the nature of kids to change their minds on a dime.”
Her mother sighed. “You were always so sure you were right. You had these pictures in your head of home, family, work, life, and nothing ever measured up. You wore me out.”
The feeling’s mutual. But saying so would not help. “All I ask is that you don’t undercut my authority with my son and—”
Aurora bent forward and coughed, holding on to her chest, her face tight with pain.
“Are you all right?” Panic surged inside Christine. She’d let her anger show and it had upset her ill mother. “Can I get you water? A pain pill?” She felt sick. She’d picked a fight with a fragile woman, not the hard-as-nails, blunt mother she’d grown up with. Shame on her.
“Stop that. My stitches burn when I cough, that’s all.”
“I didn’t mean to agitate you. I’m here to help and—”
“I said stop it, dammit. I’m not dying. I’m fine. Better than ever.” Aurora pushed up from her chair and stomped toward the door. Reaching it, she hesitated, then turned around. “Hell, that’s not how I meant that to go.”
She lifted a hand as if to reach out to Christine, then dropped it. “So…just…good night then,” she said, disappearing without waiting for Christine’s response.
When they next got together, Aurora would behave as if they’d never quarreled. That was how she handled conflict—stir it up, then let it simmer forever.