Hard Habit to Break

by Linda Cajio

  “Liz, don’t let it worry you.”

  “But it takes only a second to say them,” she mumbled, then realized it was Joe who had spoken, and not some little voice in her head. Coughing to hide her embarrassment, she hastily added, “Just a tickle in my throat. I really appreciate what you’ve done for me, but it’s up to the board now, and you know how they can be.”

  Joe put up a hand, stopping her words. “I’m sorry I told you, but I did want you to be aware of what one of the directors might be thinking about your replacing me.”

  “And I thought I had left corporate back-biting behind me in Chicago,” she commented with a chuckle.

  Joe laughed. “I came here from D.C. thirty years ago for the country air and relaxing lifestyle. Sometimes I think I would have gotten a few less ulcers back in D.C.”

  Liz grinned at him.

  “Well, enough of brainless idiots.” Joe lifted his briefcase onto the desk and opened it. He handed her a sealed envelope. “Here’s the new Brinks schedule for the month.”

  “This is different,” she said, looking at the envelope. Usually she’d just receive a phone call the day before from Joe to give her the time of a cash delivery.

  He snapped the locks of the case shut before saying, “There’ve been a few misunderstandings about delivery times, so Central decided to set up a schedule.”

  She saw a look of disgust cross Joe’s face, and couldn’t help agreeing with him. Setting up cash deliveries on a monthly basis, and worse, having it committed to paper meant more people would be aware of the delivery times.

  “What am I supposed to do with the schedule?” she asked curiously. “Commit it to memory and burn it afterward?”

  “Some clown actually suggested that,” Joe replied sarcastically. “You just have to initial it as being received and read, and then lock it in the bank’s own safety deposit box. At the end of the month you have to mail it back to Central.”

  “This isn’t going to work, Joe,” she said as she reached for a pen. “Not that the calls were much better.”

  “Short of wearing raincoats and meeting in dark alleys, nothing’s really better. But I like this method less than the calls. Too many people will see all the branch schedules, and I’m afraid someone might get greedy. Very greedy.”

  It was her turn to make a face. “And you want to give me your job now? Thanks a lot, Joe. You’re a real friend.”

  He chuckled and stood up. “I better get out of here before you have me thinking I’m pulling a dirty trick on you. Anyway, you’ve got a customer.”

  Rising, Liz glanced over her shoulder at the lobby area. Seeing the woman who was sitting on one of the chairs, she momentarily forgot about Matt and the complication of Joe’s insisting she deserved the promotion.

  “Problem?” Joe asked.

  She turned back and murmured, “Millie Jackson. I was afraid she’d be in sooner or later. I wish it had been later though.”

  “Jackson. The husband passed away a few months ago, right?” Joe asked. “I remember seeing the paperwork on the account taxes.”

  “Yes, he did,” Liz replied in a quiet voice. Financially, her farm is in a very precarious position.” She smiled wanly. “Joe, how the hell do you tell a person that no matter how you jiggle and juggle the finances, the only probable option is to sell the family farm before there’s real trouble?”

  Joe smiled and patted her shoulder. “You’re worrying for nothing, Liz. This is exactly the kind of situation in which you shine. Knowing you, you’ll find the perfect solution for the woman. I expect it’ll be something especially creative this time too. Millie Jackson has nothing to worry about with you in her corner. Well, I better be going.”

  As Liz said good-bye to him, she wished she had the confidence Joe had in her ability to help Millie. The only sensible and practical solution she could see was for Millie to sell the farm.

  Realizing she couldn’t put Millie off any longer, she forced a smile to her lips and turned to the woman. Millie returned the smile with a nervous one of her own.

  “Hello, Millie,” Liz said, gesturing for the woman to come to the desk. “I’m sorry to keep you waiting.”

  “That’s okay, Liz,” Millie replied, rising and scurrying over to sit on the edge of a visitor’s chair. Millie was in her late fifties, rail-thin, her face lined by a lifetime of perseverance and hard work.

  As Liz walked back to the desk, she took a deep breath and steeled herself for the coming interview.

  Five minutes later, the discussion every bit as painful as she’d suspected, Liz hesitated, not wanting to tell Millie that her best option was to sell the farm. She searched her mind for any other way she could change the reality of the situation for Millie. Nothing came.

  “It isn’t the debts, Liz,” Millie protested before Liz could gather the right words to make the truth more palatable. “Even if the farm were making money, I just don’t think I could do even the managing. My girls are telling me to sell out, and my head tells me that they’re right. But the whole idea of selling just breaks my heart.”

  “I know. But I think your girls are right,” Liz said in a gentle voice. She knew she was doing the best thing by agreeing with Millie’s children, but she still felt like a rat for it. There had to be something she’d overlooked. Something …

  When they’d ended their discussion and Millie finally left the bank, Liz realized Joe was right. She’d never forget customers like Millie Jackson. No bank manager worth her salt could. Why couldn’t she find that financially creative something that would allow Millie to keep her farm? Even though Millie herself seemed resigned to selling out, Liz still felt as if she were letting the widow down—and Joe too. Clearly Joe had meant only to be encouraging about her interview with Millie. But she couldn’t help feeling as if he were depending on her to come up with a solution for Millie that would dazzle the bank’s board of directors, so that they had no option but to give her the promotion.

  Liz felt a huge, invisible vise clamping down on her, allowing no relief for the pressures building inside. Nothing had been settled with Matt. Joe was expecting the impossible from her. And now Millie.

  The urge for a cigarette stronger than ever, she yanked open her bottom desk drawer, where she kept her purse. She didn’t even care if she was backsliding again as she took out a pack of cigarettes and matches. She lit a cigarette and inhaling deeply. While blowing out the smoke, she looked around for an ashtray and remembered why there wasn’t one. She had never allowed herself or the tellers to smoke while working.

  “I’m taking a break,” she announced to Georgina and Mavis. Their eyes even wider because of her unusual behavior, they nodded.

  “If I’m not back in ten minutes, I’ve gone quackers,” Liz added, and walked out the door.

  Ten

  “We’ve got to stop meeting like this, Callahan.”

  Matt’s head jerked up at the sound of a voice coming from where he’d least expected it. He’d been carefully squeezing his way through the hole in the side hedge, and now sharp twigs scratched his face and stabbed viciously at his belly.

  “Dammit, Liz! What the hell are you doing out here at this time of night?” he grumbled while scrambling the rest of the way through the hedge. Silently he vowed to cut a nice big square in the boxwood, put in a gate, and to hell with any gossip. Crawling around on the grass like a two-year-old was ridiculous.

  “I’m pondering the meaning of life,” she said in answer to his question. “And I’ve decided it’s the pits. Have a cigarette?”

  There was no moon, and he could barely make out her shadow in the darkness even though she was sitting against her garden shed less than two feet away from him. Unfortunately he couldn’t miss the small red glow that seemed to dance all by itself as Liz raised a cigarette to her lips.

  “I gave up cigarettes when I was sixteen and realized they wouldn’t make me any tougher than the rest of the guys in the street gang I belonged to,” he said. He sat down next to her
and leaned his back against the shed’s flimsy steel side. “When are you going to give up the things?”

  “I hate secure people,” Liz said, taking another puff of the cigarette. “You’d probably be able to tell Millie Jackson to sell her two-hundred-year-old farm and not even flinch at all the years and memories she’d have to give up just because it’s best for her.”

  Realizing Liz needed comfort and that he’d been lecturing at her again, Matt swore silently. He had heard Millie Jackson had been widowed just before he moved to Hopewell. Liz had had an extremely bad day, and she obviously was agonizing over it. Feeling like an ogre, he snatched the pack of cigarettes out of her hand, took one, and stuck it between his lips. “Gotta light?”

  She chuckled dryly, then pulled the cigarette from his lips and crumbled it into pieces. “I won’t lead someone else astray. It was only a momentary lapse when I offered you a cigarette. From now on, leave the vices to me.”

  “And you do them very well,” he said, placing his arm around her shoulders and settling her against his side. She wore a heavy sweater and jeans, and he resigned himself to the bulky wool that separated his hands from her silky skin. “You have your cigarette, honey. Foreclosures must really be rough.”

  “It isn’t a foreclosure, thank goodness.” She sighed. “Millie’s a widow, and she can’t keep up the farm by herself. What she needs is someone to manage the farm and hands to do the work, but she won’t get either without a dependable cash source. And farms work on speculation, which is borrowing from the bank and crossing your fingers that you can pay the money back. I ought to know, since I see more crossed fingers than money from the farmers.”

  “What’s a nice girl like you doing in the banking business?” he asked quietly, and kissed her temple. He’d never realized before how much Liz loved the people in the area and wondered if they knew it.

  “I like money and I like people, and I love pulling some strings to help them. My boss says that’s why I’m good at my job.” There was a short silence, and even though his eyes were adjusting to the black night, he sensed her wry grin more than saw it. “It makes me feel as if I’ve beaten the system on its own terms. I should be beating the system for Millie, dammit!”

  Hearing the desperation in her voice, Matt instantly sought to dispel it. “You can’t be super-banker all the time. You told Millie what you really thought was best for her, right?”

  Liz leaned back against his shoulder and nodded.

  “Then you did your best for her.”

  She flicked the half-smoked cigarette onto the ground and it disappeared under her sneakered foot as she extinguished it. “You’re probably right. But Millie wants to stay on her farm. And I ought to be able to figure out how to help her do that. The solution is there, I just know it, but somehow I can’t see it!”

  “Honey, stop torturing yourself,” he said, stroking her back to soothe her. “You know you can’t help everybody, so think of the ones you have helped, like Micah Davis—”

  “You heard about that, eh?” she broke in with a genuinely amused chuckle.

  He laughed. “You think you can throw a bull named Romeo at me and I’m not going to ask?” He became serious again. “You helped a man make a comeback with his livelihood when he thought he’d lose everything. People in this town are still talking about how much you helped him. I’m sure nobody expects Millie to try to run her farm by herself, and nobody expects you to run it for her. You advised her to her best interests, and that’s what’s important.”

  Liz sighed, and he could easily hear that he had not convinced her.

  “You were in a street gang?” she asked suddenly.

  Matt couldn’t help grinning at the instant and unexpected change of subject. He’d almost forgotten he’d mentioned his childhood in his attempt to shame her into putting out the cigarette. While that hadn’t succeeded, at least Liz had momentarily forgotten Millie Jackson.

  “I was just a dumb kid,” he said in dismissal, feeling a sudden reluctance to talk about a time long past and better forgotten. “I’d rather talk about you and—”

  “Do you realize I don’t know anything about you as a boy?” she asked, turning around until she was facing him.

  Her hip curved naturally into his own, and her breasts pressed distractingly into his chest. But it was her mouth bare inches from his that made him forget what he was going to say. He bent his head—

  Her elbow suddenly dug into his side.

  “Ouch!”

  “Serves you right.” She tried to sound cross. “We were talking about you.”

  “Us,” he corrected her, sliding his hands underneath the sweater. His fingers automatically smoothed their way up her warm flesh to unsnap her bra. “You don’t need this.”

  He received another elbow in his ribs for his efforts.

  “Dammit Liz!” he exclaimed, rubbing his side.

  “Talk,” she ordered as she resettled herself against him.

  “I was just a dumb kid, that’s all. Can I kiss you now?” he asked, hoping she’d be satisfied with his short answer.

  She wasn’t. “If you were just a dumb kid, then why don’t you tell me about it? Or maybe you have something to hide. Like a jail sentence. Good Lord! Did you kill someone in a gang fight?” she teased.

  A chuckle escaped him. “You’ve got one hell of an imagination, honey. It was nothing like that. I just got in with a bad crowd until I wised up. The worst things I ever learned were to cut school, smoke, and how to hot-wire a car in under three minutes.”

  Liz burst out laughing.

  “Shh!” he hissed almost reluctantly as the sound seemed to boom in the night air. He loved the sound of her laughter, but someone might hear her, and he had no wish for her to be discovered in an embarrassing position with him. And if her small but fully-rounded breasts kept jiggling against his chest as they were doing at the moment, Liz would find herself in more than an embarrassing position. She’d find herself naked and underneath him.

  To his relief and disappointment, her laughter subsided into a fit of giggles and she finally gasped out, “But I did that stuff, too, as a kid.”

  “You stole cars for the chop shops?” he asked in disbelief, and immediately wished he’d never voiced the too revealing question.

  Her jaw dropped in clear astonishment. “You stole cars with a gang!”

  “I started several cars without keys,” he flatly admitted as his hands automatically dropped away from her. “And none of them were mine. Then I realized how stupid it was and got out, okay?”

  She suddenly rose up on her knees and wound her arms around his shoulders.

  “Oh, Matt,” she murmured as she pressed his head to her breast.

  He mistook the concern in her tone for pity, and it infuriated him. He pushed her arms away and scrambled to his feet.

  “You want to feel sorry for me, then fine! Here’s the whole story. I have no idea who my father was, and my mother dropped me on the welfare office doorstep when I was a baby. I had a foster mother who was good to me, but she died when I was sixteen, and the next home wasn’t so good, so I ran away and lived on the streets, pushing myself into more and more trouble. It wasn’t long before I realized how stupid I’d been to take out my hurt on the world. I had no skills and no diploma other than the kind you get on the streets. And that’s where you stay if you don’t have anything else. So I bugged a modeling agency for a job because I thought the work was easy and because everyone called me ‘pretty boy.’ They finally gave me one. Now I live happily ever after in Smalltown, U.S.A., where I always wanted to belong. End of Oliver Twist, okay? I don’t want your pity, and I’m sorry as hell I even brought the subject up!”

  Sleepless hours later in his lonely bed, Matt realized he’d never given Liz a chance to speak before he’d scrambled back through the hedge and into the house. And if she had spoken, he doubted he would have listened at the time. He’d been too angry—and afraid that he’d lost her respect. Logically he knew she’
d already been upset about Millie Jackson having to sell her farm, so it was understandable that she’d have compassion for a boy headed for self-destruction. If their lives had been reversed, he’d probably feel the same for her. The past shouldn’t matter anymore. It hadn’t mattered for a long time. Maybe he’d subconsciously avoided telling her because of what had happened with her ex-husband. But he just couldn’t shake the feeling that it was important to wipe away that moment of pity from Liz. Only how?

  He discarded several sudden wild ideas, and as he did, he found the problem of Millie Jackson intruding on his consciousness. Liz had said the woman needed manpower and a constant cash flow to keep up her farm. He had moved to Hopewell because he’d always wanted to live in a place where the people cared about one another. Maybe it was time to show Liz he cared as much as she did, by helping Millie. If he did something to earn the town’s respect, it should be more than enough to wipe out his disreputable past.

  Mulling over how good it would feel to have Liz back in his arms, he finally drifted off to sleep.

  Backing her car out of her driveway and slowly cruising past Matt’s house, Liz frowned with worry when she saw that the living room drapes were still closed and the Corvette was still missing from the driveway.

  “Seven days,” she muttered out loud, and pressed down heavily on the gas. The car lurched forward, and she instantly eased off the pedal, slowing to a normal speed.

  Grimacing, she remembered how Matt had disappeared the morning after their argument. She hadn’t been able to get an apology in edgeways. It was all his fault that she had felt sorry for the teenage Matt. If he’d been a demanding male, all bellows and orders, she would have gladly called the police to check on the statute of limitations. But no, he had been tender and understanding with her, so naturally, when she’d heard about his deprived childhood, she’d felt an overwhelming rush of love and sympathy. She’d never considered not expressing them.